Giambattista Vico

Giambattista Vico (23 June 1668-23 January 1744) was an Italian political philosopher and rhetorician, historian, and jurist of the Enlightenment era.

Biography
Giambattista Vico was born in Naples, Kingdom of Naples in 1668, and he graduated from the University of Naples in 1694 as a doctor of civil and canon law. Vico worked as a tutor in Vatolla (south of Salerno) for nine years, and he then assumed a chair in rhetoric at the University of Naples. Vico became a well-known political philosopher and rhetorician, historian, and jurist during the Enlightenment era, as he criticized the expansion and development of modern rationalism, was an apologist for Classical Antiquity, was a precursor of systematic and complex thought (opposing Cartesian analysis and other types of reductionism), and exposed the fundamentals of social science and semiotics. He coined the phrase "What is true is precisely what is made", supporting constructivist epistemology, and he inaugurated the modern field of the philosophy of history. Vico's magnum opus was Scienza Nuova in 1725, in which he attempted to make humanities a single field of science, and in which he recorded and explained the historical cycles by which societies rose and fell. He died in 1744.